Sermons
A Message by the Rev. Harvey G. Throop
Palisades Presbyterian Church
San Diego, California
November 1 , 2009
What About Predestination?
(Romans 8:28-31)
“For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son…”
(Romans 8:29a)
This morning, we are going to focus our thoughts on a Biblical doctrine that has sometimes mistakenly been considered a product of Presbyterian theology: the doctrine of “predestination.” The truth of the matter is, however, that “predestination” is no more Presbyterian than it is Methodist, Baptist, Lutheran or Roman Catholic. Its association with Presbyterians probably comes from the fact that one of the great systematic thinkers of the protestant Reformation and a founder of the Presbyterian Church, John Calvin, spent a great deal of time developing the doctrine of predestination as he understood it through scripture. But the doctrine, itself, is clearly articulated throughout the Bible.
For example, in Romans 8, the Apostle Paul writes: “ For those whom he (God) foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son…” (Romans 8:29).
In his Letter to the Ephesians, Paul writes, “He (God) chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world … as a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him…” (Ephesians 1:4,10).
The writer of 1 Peter writes that Jesus “was destined before the foundation of the world” to save God's people (1 Peter 1:20).
You can't read the Bible without seeing that God has a plan for the world. Sometimes explicitly and at other times implicitly, some form of predestination is woven throughout all of scripture.
Predestination, quite simply, is a doctrine that underscores the sovereignty of God and holds that God's ultimate purposes in the world will, in the end, be accomplished no matter what.
The problem this presents, however, is this: how can God's plan be achieved in history without human freedom being violated? How can God's purposes be realized without humans becoming pawns in a game the conclusion of which does not depend upon their wills?
Unfortunately, what most people seem to understand by the word “predestination” is “determinism” or “fatalism” -- the notion that God not only has a plan for every one of us but that our lives are simply a playing out of the script God has written.
Do we really believe that God creates us like Himself and then abandons us to be helpless and hopeless victims of chance?
A sophisticated form of fatalism was advanced a number of years ago in a book by behavioral psychologist, B.F. Skinner, entitled, Beyond Freedom and Dignity (Hackett Publishing Company [Indianapolis, 1971]). His contention was that we are predestined by our D.N.A. and that it's all about genetics and environment. Skinner's ideas rule out our human freedom – our freedom of will.
Predestination, as presented by John Calvin, was an answer to some of life's most nagging questions: “Why was I born?” “What is my purpose in life?” “Why am I the way I am?” “What am I supposed to do?”
Predestination proposes that God called us into being, knows us and has provided for our salvation.
To believe that God has a plan for our lives and that He is working his plan out leaves us with a question: how can we be responsible for what we do or do not do? Do we even have a choice?
And the answer is: just as the Bible speaks and bears witness to the power and authority of God, so it also speaks and bears witness to the freedom of humans.
In the Garden of Eden, humans could choose whether or not to eat the forbidden fruit (see Genesis 3:6).
Each of us can “choose this and every day whom we will serve” (see Joshua 24:15).
What the Bible tells us is this: God has absolute power and humans are made free. God has a plan and nothing that we can do in our freedom can ultimately alter the fulfillment of his plan.
But how can that be? How can God have power and control and humans still be free?
Leslie D. Weatherhead, in his book The Will of God , writes:
“Picture in your minds a group of children playing beside a tiny stream that runs down a mountainside to join a river in the valley below. The little children can do all kinds of things to that stream on its way down! They can damn it up, divert it, divide it and make in into two streams. They can do all sorts of things – with one exception: they cannot succeed in preventing the water from finally reaching the river at the bottom of the valley” (Weatherhead, The Will of God, Abington, [Nashville, 1972], pp. 49-50).
The point is: in comparison to God, we are but as little children. Though we may divert and hinder His purposes, nothing we do can ultimately prevent God's plan from being realized.
Weatherhead distinguishes between the intentional will of God -- God's ideal plan for humankind; the circumstantial will of God --God's plan within certain circumstances; and the ultimate will of God – God's final realization of his purposes” (Weatherhead, p. 28).
He uses the life of Christ to illustrate those three distinctive wills. He begins, “Was it God's intention from the beginning that Jesus should go to the Cross?” No! Jesus came with the intention that men and women should follow him, not kill him. The discipleship of men and women was the intentional will of God.
However, when circumstances brought about by human evil set up such a dilemma that Christ was compelled either to die or to run away, then in those circumstances the Cross was the will of God, but only in those circumstances.
Yet, through those circumstances, not in spite of them, God in Christ achieved his ultimate will in as complete a sense as he would have done if his intentional will had not been temporarily defeated (Weatherhead, pp 13-16).
God's intention is always for our greatest good. All his laws of cause and affect are designed with that in mind.
God calls each of us to righteousness, but in creating us free, he allows for sin. The effect of sin is separation from God. But what we mean for evil, God can use for good (see Genesis 50:20). The results of our sin can turn us back to God, and his ultimate plan for our lives can still be accomplished.
Now, this is where we come to predestination. Predestination has to do with God's knowing. Everything in the Bible that teaches us about God tells us that God is all-knowing (see 1 John 3:20). God calls the stars by name (see Psalm 147:4). God numbers the hairs on our heads (see Matthew 10:30). God knows when a sparrow falls to the ground (see Matthew 10:29). Above and beyond time, God knows everything past, present and future. There is no past or future on God's calendar. His time is always “present.”
God knows what you and I are going to do today and tomorrow. God knows what is going to happen in your life and mine from day to day. Remember how the psalmist put it in Psalm 139:
“O LORD, you have searched me and known me.
You know when I sit down and when I rise up;
you discern my thoughts from far away.
You search out my path and my lying down,
and are acquainted with all my ways.
Even before a word is on my tongue,
O LORD, you know it completely…
Such knowledge is too wonderful for me;
it is so high that I cannot attain it…
For it was you who formed my inward parts;
you knit me together in my mother's womb…
My frame was not hidden from you,
when I was being made in secret,
intricately woven in the depths of the earth.
Your eyes beheld my unformed substance.
In your book were written
all the days that were formed for me,
when none of them as yet existed.
How weighty to me are your thoughts, O God!
How vast is the sum of them!...
Search me, O God, and know my heart;
test me and know my thoughts.
See if there is any wicked way in me,
and lead me in the way everlasting.”
(Psalm 139:1,2,3,4,6,13,15,16,17,23,24)
But God's knowing what we are going to do neither limits our own choices nor our accountability for what we do. God's “knowing” is not what causes a thing to happen.
When I'm watching a San Diego Charger's football game with my son-in-law, Jay, and Jay says, “(Quarterback) Rivers is going to get sacked again,” it is not Jay's “knowing” that that makes Rivers get sacked. It's other things – like Rivers holding onto the ball too long or the front line not doing their job!
Or it's like a teacher's “knowing” at school. A teacher can “know” with the utmost certainty that a student who hasn't studied for an exam is going to fail it. But it is not the teacher's “knowing” that makes the student fail. It's the student's lack of preparation. So it is with God's “knowing.”
God knows what you and I are going to do with our freedom today and tomorrow. But whatever happens as an outcome of what we do is the result of our “doing” and not of God's “knowing.” Moreover, in everything that happens, God works for the good of those who try to live according to his purposes.
Have you ever tried to wonder what God has in store for you in the future? We probably all have. I have, but I've never succeeded in finding out. But I have looked back. And whenever I've looked back, I have seen most clearly a predestined course. It's incredible to me how God has guided me. When some doors have shut, others have opened. God has worked some of the worst things that could have happened in my life – as I saw them then – into some of the best things that could have happened, as I look back at them today. Isn't that the same for you?
What about our spiritual growth – our faith? We read in John 15:15, “You did not choose me, but I chose you.” What does that mean, “You did not choose me?”
Jesus came to earth, lived, died on the cross and rose from the dead. I had nothing to do with that. God did it. The Good News of God's love in Christ I heard about. I had nothing really to do with that. God provided the means, the people and the opportunities. God also gave me the capacity for faith and the ability to live. Again, I had nothing to do with that. So his word is true: “I did not chose him, but he chose me” (see John 15:16). He chose you, too.
Now, some people reject this whole doctrine of predestination because they get confused over such questions as: how God decides whom to choose; how God decides who is saved and who is lost; who wins and who loses. And they go on to argue that if God chooses to save some, that he must also choose not to save others. That is what is referred to as “double predestination.”
Nowhere does the Bible say that God deliberately rejects anyone. In fact, it states quite the opposite – that it is not God's will that any of his children should perish (see Matthew 18:14). The Bible states it in the positive. God chooses. And we have the freedom to choose how we respond. But God's choosing us for salvation does not mean that our lives will be easier. Whenever God chooses, he does so not for privilege but for responsibility.
The greatest use we can make of our God-given freedom is to respond to God's offer of love with acceptance in gratitude and humility and then seek to live in obedience to God for the rest of our lives. Seeking to do God's will, we are assured in scripture that nothing can ever defeat us, for “in everything God will work for good with those who love him, who are called according to his purpose (see Romans 8:28).
We are reminded of the words to that old hymn, “Make Me A Captive Lord, and then I shall be Free.”
Believing that you and I are children of God out of His choosing us and our accepting his call, we are to believe that God has a plan for our lives. If we trust his sovereignty and if we recognize and accept the responsibility of our freedom, we can live in trust, knowing that in spite of whatever uncertainties, failures, troubles, frustrations and hurts we experience, that God's love will never fail us. Rather, with God's help, whatever we experience can be turned into spiritual gain and ultimate good.
The doctrine of predestination, simply put, tells us that God is working out a loving purpose far too deep for us to begin to understand, and that nothing that our lives must endure – regardless of what it may be – will be able to overcome that plan!
If we accept God's offer of grace and live in faithfulness, obedience and trust in Him, the joyful ending He has promised us in Christ will become our ending, and we will be able to say with the psalmist:
“Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me
all the days of my life,
and I shall dwell in the house of the LORD
forever” (Psalm 23:6).
